Fiction, Games, and Game Design

Tag Archives: game aid

I just uploaded what should be the final version of GURPS Extra-Lite. Other than the font and some formatting, the only thing that changed was that I finally made it compliant with Steve Jackson Games’ Online Policy for fan-made websites and game aids.

It used to say this:

The material presented here is my original creation, intended for use with the GURPS system from Steve Jackson Games. This material is not official and is not endorsed by Steve Jackson Games.

GURPS is a trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and its rules and art are copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by Steve Jackson Games. This game aid is the original creation of Frank Wilcox, Jr (fewilcox) and is released for free distribution, and not for resale, under the permissions granted in the Steve Jackson Games Online Policy.

They’ll also allow you to use most of their art as long as you follow their Online Policy. So if you ever see a game aid or other fan-work for any SJ game that doesn’t have one of the above disclaimers, send the author that link. Whereas some companies are really stingy with their IPs and actively discourage fan works (I would literally be in violation of Pokémon’s online policy if I were to even link you to it), SJG welcomes them, so the least we can do is give them their due credit.

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I have finally gotten serious about learning Dvorak. More details on that later, but it means that for now it takes me a couple of days longer to write a blog post (I’ve already spent two days working on one about my Dvorak journey. prompting this quick one). Within a month, however, I should be able to type faster for longer, but most importantly, with much less pain.

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I have updated my tournament deck list sheet for the 2016 Play! Pokémon season. I am only about halfway done making a form-fillable version since I’m learning how as I go along. Since no sets will be rotating out of Expanded, I’ll have to do a major rebuild of that section of the sheet since I’m still having trouble getting OpenOffice to properly attach set symbols to cells so they aren’t left behind when I copy the table into Writer. That said, I hope to have the post-rotation form-fillable version available for our Mossdeep League Challenge.

Speaking of the Mossdeep LC, we are giving out door prizes at this event. Each registered player will get one entry, and anyone who arrives at the store with a pre-filled out deck sheet gets a bonus entry. Details can be found on the tournament’s facebook event. The overhaul to the Professor program is leaving us with fewer prizes than we had hoped, so we’re happy to accept donations if you have anything suitable lying around.

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Even while working on various roleplaying tools, I’ve been focused on Pokémon quite a bit lately, probably because our League Challenge is tomorrow afternoon.

For several months now I’ve been gathering all of the legends from the older video games so I can transfer them up to Black 2 and then sell them (the cartridges, of course, not the legends). RIght now I’m grinding to go after Heatran and Giratina, the only ones I’m missing in Pearl. In the course of doing that I discovered that my Pocket-sized Type and EV List needed updating. While I was at I applied what I have learned about PDF creation with OpenOffice and reformatted it accordingly. There are two major changes: it finally includes the effort point yields of the Pokémon introduced in X/Y, I switched the font from FreeSans to Verdana, which is a bit sharper and therefore easier to read at this scale.

The other thing I did is related to tomorrow’s tournament: I added the two newest sets to the Deck List Sheet for the 2014-15 Tournament Season and rebuilt it somewhat using new my skills. It still has some visual issues that bug me, but will take a major rebuild to fix them and a lot of people won’t even notice them, so that can wait until after tomorrow’s LC.

Some of the floors in our house have rotted away. Since my Disability payments aren’t very much and my wife has been out of work for two years we can’t afford the thousands of dollars we need to repair the busted plumbing that is causing our floors to rot. Will you help?

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I have uploaded to scribd what I hope will be the final version of my Character Library spreadsheet. All it is lacking is an XP box. As it will take quite a bit of work to squeeze that in, I will only be adding if there is demand for it. In the meantime just list the character’s XP in the “Character Background and Other Notes” box.

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There are drawbacks to being a long-time devotee to a piece of software. Because Opera has been my default browser since version 5, someone had to point out to me the custom search function that every other browser has since copied and which I can no longer live without. I run into the same issue from time to time with Open Office. I first started using OO about 15 years ago with StarOffice 5 (now you know why OO’s executable is soffice.exe instead of openoffice.exe). At that time it was a single application that opened all of your documents into a single tabbed instance like MS Works did and browsers do now.

Since then hundreds of changes have taken place, so it’s no surprise that I missed a few. In this particular case it’s the PDF export function. Up until now I’ve been exporting my character sheets from OO using various free PDF printers (I especially recommend Cute and Primo). Naturally, that method has its limitations; for one thing, you can’t export links that way.

For my new 10 page long D&D 5e supersheet I decided to finally try out OpenOffice’s PDF export function – the resulting file was one quarter the size of the PrimoPDF version. The drawback is that for some reason the various lines came out much thinner when exported than when printed, forcing me to re-do most of the first page. While I was at it I figured I may as well take another stab at the AC shield, which I had made in Gimp but with which I was never wholly satisfied.

The first thing I did was load up the old XCF and switch it to a sans-serif font, but when I started changing the thicknesses of all of the lines in OO Writer it got tiring having to constantly change and re-import the image. For several years now I’ve been meaning to learn my way around OO Draw, so I took that as my cue to finally do it. In the end I only actually made the curved bottom half of the shield in Draw and the rest in Writer itself, but it was a good learning experience and only took about an hour.

The only other major change I made was eliminating most of my use of Times New Roman. As it was most of the sheet was in sans-serif Verdana, but the skills and several other things used TNR instead. Now the skills use TNR because serif fonts are easier to read in sentences , but everything else is in Verdana because sans-serif fonts are generally easier to read in titles.

There’s also one change that end users won’t see but that other character sheet designers might find useful: I put all of the front page’s various frames into one giant one. When I first made the supersheet I had to manually copy over each of those frames into the new document, and that was as tedious as it was painful. Since I was rebuilding it anyway, it made sense to put it all into one frame to make it more portable. Now I can put into a new document with a single copy-paste.

A few hours ago I finally finished several days’ work making all the requisite changes to the front of the character sheet and made a test print. My task for later today is incorporating those changes into original documents since I rebuilt it in a new document. Fortunately, since I’m in the habit of using paragraph and character styles rather than in-line formatting whenever possible, I should be able to modify all of the spell, inventory, and beast form sheets in less than an hour.

Naturally, my chronic pain issues limit how much of that kind of intensive computer work I can do at a time, but I hope to have the new sheets uploaded in less than a day, keep your eyes peeled here for the announcement.

After spending a couple of hours searching I was surprised to find that there wasn’t any sort of reference to tell you which Munchkin games are compatible, other than Munchkin Thingies, a free download from Steve Jackson Games. The problem is that it’s a thorough 15-page slog, which makes it fantastic for researching your next purchase but useless when staring indecisively at the FLGS shelf. To that end I used the headings in Thingies to make this handy reference table. Now you can tell at a glance which new Munchkin games are compatible with the ones you already have.

Game

Classes

Races

Unique

Munchkin

X

X

Munchkin Apocalypse

X

Munchkin Axe Cop

X

Munchkin Bites!

X

Munchkin Booty

X

Accents

Munchkin Conan

X

X

Birthrights

Munchkin Cthulhu

X

Munchkin Fu

X

The Good, the Bad and the Munchkin

X

Munchkin Grimm Tidings

X

Munchkin Impossible

X

Loyalties

Munchkin Legends

X

X

Moop’s Monster Mashup

X

X

Munchkin Oz

X

Munchkin Pathfinder

X

Factions

Munchkin Shakespeare

X

X

Munchkin Spell Skool

X

Classes are called “Clubs”

Star Munchkin

X

X

Munchkin Steampunk

X

Super Munchkin

X

Munchkin Zombies

Mojos

Last updated 2017-07-06.

The material presented here is my original creation, intended for use with Munchkin from Steve Jackson Games. This material is not official and is not endorsed by Steve Jackson Games.